The healthcare supply chain is critical to ensuring patients have timely access to life-saving medications and treatments. As a leading pharmaceutical solutions provider, Cencora — formerly AmerisourceBergen — knows how vital a reliable, secure data exchange is to these efforts.
In a recent webinar, we had the chance to sit down with two members of the Cencora team: senior director of IT product lead Scott Marshall and manager of technical administration Ananth Agastya.
They provided a closer look into how Cencora, a recipient of Axway’s 2024 Visionary Excellence Award, is using Axway’s B2B integration platform to connect with thousands of customers and suppliers globally to ensure the right products are available as needed.
How EDI fits into Cencora’s healthcare supply chain dynamics
As a global healthcare enterprise, Cencora has an annual revenue of more than $260 billion. The company’s electronic data interchange (EDI) channel handles approximately 65% of the daily order volume for products.
Cencora’s healthcare supply chain includes over 29,000 active trading partners. Within this partner network, they must support 300 million transactions annually and account for the ongoing onboarding of roughly 500 new partners each month.
To improve the lives of people and animals via medications and treatments, Cencora needs 100% reliability in their business transactions. After all, one blip in the performance of a B2B integration platform can lead to critical issues that impact business relationships and Cencora’s bottom line.
Ensuring reliability while navigating other supply chain challenges
The rise of APIs
For years, EDI has been a powerful tool for driving efficiency in the healthcare supply chain. While that remains the case, APIs are becoming popular as well. Healthcare providers must adapt to how people want to work with APIs while still keeping up with the standards and discipline of EDIs.
See also: solving modern business challenges with API EDI integration
Responsive security
The healthcare supply chain has become increasingly vulnerable to security threats as reliance on interconnected IT systems grows. This calls for an even faster lifecycle for patching vulnerabilities and having a plan to test and release those updates into the production environment.
New regulations
Designed to help secure drug supply chains, the Drug Supply Chain Security Act (DSCSA) has prompted healthcare organizations to change their systems and processes. This way, they can track and report on products at every stage of the distribution lifecycle.
Cencora shapes the future of B2B data exchanges with Axway
Cencora requires a B2B integration platform it can depend on to operate at the scale it does. With Axway serving as their connection point for many customers and trading partners, the pharmaceutical solutions provider has that confidence.
The platform’s multi-datacenter architecture allows for redundancies that ensure reliable performance, and they leverage B2Bi in an Axway managed cloud.
With file gateways in different locations, Cencora can create an always-on experience where they don’t have to worry about users being able to connect.
What’s more, Cencora has a CSOS-specific platform with Axway – something that is important to the provider’s partners and from a DEA compliance standpoint.
Evolving the platform to support business operations
Cencora aims to make it easy and secure for companies to work with them. Backed by Axway’s B2B integration solutions, they’ve leveraged custom workflows to automate onboarding processes, allowing partners to get up and running on the system in less than a day and enabling quick transactions.
They’ve also launched a portal to automate certificate renewals — a required step in enabling EDI connections. This was done by creating applications that leverage B2Bi APIs; all Axway solutions are designed with an API-first approach in mind.
Learn more about how Axway brings EDI and API together on an integrated platform.
Looking ahead, Cencora is committed to moving toward an even more cloud-based architecture that includes containerization.
They’re also exploring AI capabilities to eliminate hands-on processes and experimenting with automated patching that could happen without businesses’ knowledge.
While leveraging Axway’s technology to support these efforts, Cencora also has access to Axway’s people for guidance at every step.
Individuals at Axway work with Cencora daily to build an infrastructure that is helping to shape the enterprise’s operations and their partners’ experiences.
Dive deeper into how Cencora is overcoming healthcare supply chain complexities with the help of Axway.
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